Comments on: Rat Snake

By: The year in trees | Via Negativa

The year in trees | Via Negativa — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 02:40:09 +0000

[...] I don’t think I ever blogged this photo, because I was too busy making a black-and-white video poem out of the footage I shot that day. Two months later, we spotted the snake emerging from the same [...]

By: In and Out | Via Negativa

In and Out | Via Negativa — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 05:30:25 +0000

[...] first part of this video may look familiar — I used it for a video poem back in July. At the time, I kind of felt I should upload a straight-up, full-color version of the [...]

By: Bill

Bill — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 02:46:57 +0000

Dave, thanks. I’m very glad you’re doing snakes.

By: Dave

Dave — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 02:21:08 +0000

Maybe you don’t need to write poems, Bill, and it’s I who should be envious of your awesome commenting skills! I like the way you brought it back to snakes at the end. And I’m pleased and honored that my snake video poetry has proved so stimulating. This is some deep terrain you’ve gotten into, I think. Thanks for sharing your thought processes with us here — this has turned into a very memorable thread indeed. (Well, any thread with Howlin’ wolf in it has got to be good.)

By: Bill

Bill — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 00:35:49 +0000

I wouldn’t be content just to toss images out there as you do — ah, but I’m not content. It feels destructive, a reaping of things before they’re ripe, making a certainty of failure. Anyway, if I were to write a complex, synretic poem it would be unprecedented. I don’t know how to do it. Maybe someday I will. I think I sort of did here, better than I ever have so far.

I’m very pleased with your snake presentations. Without them I would never have had a clue how important the snake is, in ways I would never of thought. We’re all so busy running over them I think we may all forget. I get the feeling that I’m not wrong when I guess at their centrality (think thread) at the heart of things. Really, I had no idea (other than an urge to eat them!) Some might say that it could be anything, dwell on anything and it will become central to you. But today, with snakes, I feel certain that there is more to it. I feel they have preceded me. I like the way they go through the grass, piercing it, parting it, touching its surface with nearly half of their skin, laying across it — groins, throats, everything sole.

No, I never came close to seeing Howlin’ Wolf. But yesterday I imbibed of the website of someone who did, who befriended him, took pictures of him, a youngster changed by the much older Wolf, Sandy somebody (good pictures, good stories). I had no idea Wolf acted out on stage. I’d thought of him as an old man in a chair, and maybe he was, but he had a long life as a strong man. I was pleased to read of him as sweet, responsible guy. Organized, middle-class. Angry, yes, but a good manager, a guy with a beautiful wife and a great marriage, a farmer who knew about snakes.

By: Dave

Dave — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 20:06:21 +0000

I do wish there were more Howlin’ Wolf videos on YouTube. I’ve heard he had quite an interesting live act. Did you catch him before he passed?

By: Dave

Dave — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 20:05:01 +0000

See, this is precisely what motivates me as a writer: to try and work seemingly unrelated images into new networks of associations. I’ve always thought of myself as primarily a syncretic rather than a purely creative thinker. But I like to make stuff; I wouldn’t be content just to toss images out there as you do. Probably that means you are better at practicing non-attachment than me. Fortunately I’m not a Buddhist. :)

By: Bill

Bill — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 19:17:20 +0000

Laura, thanks. No Flickr account. I don’t create freestanding writing. I’m a symbiont to poets like Dave.

By: Laura

Laura — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 19:10:54 +0000

Bill,
I like your clutter and your photographs. Why don’t you post more of your writing on your blog? I tried to post a couple of comments but my computer is being wacky today. do you have a flickr account?

By: Bill

Bill — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 18:59:45 +0000

Hey, thanks Dave-no-you’re-the-poet and Laura!

I’ve got yet more clutter. The things aren’t in themselves clutter, they’re just not all very clearly related to your post:

The way Levantine metal smiths would hammer out a sheet which would grow like a ’spreading cloud’ from an ingot of smelted earth. (That’s the tree.)

Ametal roof with holes. (Tree again, maybe your house.)

‘Meteoric’ black stone cupped in protruding lips on a bulging corner of the Kaaba. (Snake? Tree? Sky? I’m not sure.)

The way a profile sits in a block of stone. (Not related.)

Kiswah luffing in a puff of wind. (Totally not related.)

Snake trapped between the broken ends of Asclepius’ rod (any rat snake worth its mettle would have flung itself off in a heartbeat). (Yes! Related. The snake.)

Rat snake on watch, tefillin in a tree. (Could you go that far?)

Rat snake as the crux, and as ornament, fibula between scapular sky. (Or this far?)

Chester Burnett, in khakis and madras shirt, crawling on a stage singing Crawlin’ King Snake, just before he died. (By way of a change-up.)